• Armand1@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Wait, this is real? I thought this was a joke…

    Like “Back in my day, bananas were bright purple, but that breed died out.”

    • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      I also thought this was a joke until I read the comments. Pistachios have always been pistachio coloured in the rest of the world.

      There’s something very American about drowning a perfectly healthy natural product in brightly coloured dye.

        • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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          21 hours ago

          Presumably at their request, or at least their approval, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing in any other country. Most products in the US are imported, don’t pass the buck. “Iran forced it on us” goes against absolutely everything else we know about US consumers.

    • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      Nope. It’s real. I was actually thinking about this the other day and just “wondered”. Probably got busy with work and forgot to Google it and then this. I remembered them being red when I was a kid. Now I know why.

    • ajikeshi@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      many different kinds of bananas and plantains

      and even the “original banana-flavour”-banana is still around, the kind is called “grand michel” and can still be bought, but is no longer suitable for mass farming (due to some fungi/bacteria vulnerability)

    • rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio
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      2 days ago

      I also figured this was just a “let’s screw with the youth”-type post. We used to eat pistachios all the time when I was a kid (I’m 35) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a red one before today. They were always beige/greenish.

        • Drusas@fedia.io
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          1 day ago

          I’m two decades younger and remember all that except red pistachios. And my family used to eat a lot of pistachios.

          • ...m...@ttrpg.network
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            15 hours ago

            …i can remember watching the apollo-soyuz flight and i remember old people eating red pistachios; i also remember loose tobacco shops in every shopping mall and used to show up at the airport five minutes before my flight and waltz onto the plane without issue…

        • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          Hey, I’m not even 40 and I remember getting to check out the cockpit of a plane multiple times. And the brown glass ashtrays at McDonalds.

          • Dasus@lemmy.world
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            17 hours ago

            Where? In EU and Australia at least tobacco is taxed to high heaven and costs like 10+ western money units (take whichever, dollar or euro, still roughly applies) a pack/pouch

            I pay 14.30€ for a 30g pouch of rolling tobacco. And it’s probably more expensive the next time I buy because the pack before that was 13.50€. There’s a few price-hikes every year.

            • DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz
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              14 hours ago

              I’m in the US but it varies state to state. Some states are dirt cheap while others are insanely high. Probably 8 to 10 dollars a pack on average around me

              • Dasus@lemmy.world
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                13 hours ago

                Oh well, it’s still a bit cheaper than here, relatively.

                But I remberer lots of people saying how they were gonna quit once packs hit 5€. And at the time it felt like something crazy that would never happen, and packs cost like 3 or at most 4€ then.

                I mean yeah, I don’t consume as much cigarettes nowadays, in fact none, but am still a smoker as I don’t like smoking weed without tobacco, but I also don’t like smoking tobacco without weed.

                My opinion is just that vice taxes are shit, because while there might be an argument made, it disproportionately affects people of different income. What’s a pack of ciggies tripling their price to someone with high and stable income? Nothing. What is it to the lowest classes? With minimum wage back in idk say 2005 you only needed to work like 15-20min to earn enough for ciggies, now it’s definitely more than an hour. And that’s not counting income taxation etc, just from gross pay.

        • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Yeah, I’m 38 and remember red pistachios. Also remember finding some sort of worm thing burrowed into one of those red pistachios, while I was sitting at my grandfather’s kitchen table eating pistachios. Didn’t stop me. Well, it stopped me from eating that one. But I’m always leery if a pistachio has a hole in it.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      It’s absolutely real; there’s a joke about it in The Naked Gun.

      It’s not that there used to be a red variety of pistashio, they were sold coated in this oily red gunk that would stain your fingers pink. That stopped at some point in the late 90’s early 2000s.

    • hissing meerkat@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      There are bananas that are dark red to dark purple, those varieties barely get imported to the US. For some reason the import market is 1-variety-of-bananas-at-a-time-until-it-goes-extinct.

    • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The real answer is that yes, they were red, but no it wasn’t because they were poor quality.

      It’s because the world’s largest exporter was Iran, and Iran had a blanket policy of dying their pistachios red.

    • Pirat@lemmy.org
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      1 day ago

      There are still some dark purple bananas out there. They are usually less than 1/2 the size of a normal (cavendish?) banana. They don’t taste as good to me but many people love them.